It's high noon at the Columbia Tower Club on the 75th floor of downtown's tallest building, and a dozen ladies are gathered around a dark wood table in a room with an expansive view of the freeway. The occasion for this awkwardly intimate gathering: a discussion (formerly billed as a "talk"—at $47, the promoter apparently didn't sell many tickets) with Diane MacEachern, author of Big Green Purse: Use Your Spending Power to Create a Cleaner, Greener World.

While picking at chalky slabs of salmon and overdressed salads, the women toss a volley of green-lifestyle questions at MacEachern. What kind of lipstick should I buy? Should I buy my daughter a new car? How do I know if the cosmetics industry is lying to me? MacEachern, a tiny, well-coiffed woman in a lime-green quilted jacket and sensible black pants, answers each question with a confident, beatific smile: one without phthalates or other toxic chemicals; no; when a manufacturer substantiates the claim with third-party verification. The women range from about 19 years old to perhaps 55, although most are closer to the latter.

Two things struck me as I listened to the lengthy question-and-answer session. One: I am completely out of touch with what upper-middle-class American women care about. Listening to MacEachern's advice that women take one "day off" each week from using makeup (one-quarter of American women use 15 different products on their faces and bodies every day), my main thought was, there's no way any of these women are going to take five minutes off from makeup. And give up their cars? Forget it—most of the women met each other in the parking garage.

The second, and related, thought, is: Holy fuck, we have a long way to go. As lunch began, MacEachern went around the table and asked everyone to name one thing they'd done to be "a little greener" in the past week. One had taken the bus from her home on the Eastside to a show downtown last month; another had decided to go to an "eco-resort" for her next vacation (she'd considered a more rustic destination, but "you want to be pampered"). When my lunch companion mentioned we'd walked downtown, heads nodded in earnest admiration.

In Big Green Purse, MacEachern does suggest things like taking the bus, of course; but she does it with a kind of wink-wink complicity that says, "Obviously, I'm not suggesting you do anything crazy. If you want to just, you know, keep your tires inflated, that's good too." It's a point she emphasized repeatedly at the Columbia Tower Club, telling the ladies over and over, "You don't have to be perfect; just be a little better."

And her book is full of little suggestions for doing just that. Don't buy fruit already diced and packaged in plastic tubs. Toss your condoms in the trash, not the toilet. Buy a small or hybrid car, and write a letter to car companies urging them to make more "ecofriendly" cars. And (my personal favorite), buy clothes made from organic cotton and bamboo. "The organic chemise we buy today can convince a grower to switch to organic farming tomorrow," MacEachern breezes.

It's true, of course, that buying quality stuff is better than buying total crap. And nearly everyone could stand to drive a little less, buy a few products organically, ask companies to send them fewer catalogs, and use energy-saving power strips. The problem is that suggestions like these, while useful, don't add up to the kind of greenhouse-gas reductions we need to avoid cooking the planet in the next few years. And the fact that that's the goal we should be aiming for—slow greenhouse-gas emissions, slow climate change—gets a little lost in MacEachern's Hints from Heloise approach to living a "cleaner, greener" existence. Just be a little better—drive a little less, use a little less stuff—and everything's going to be okay. The implication seems to be that somebody has to sacrifice—but not you.

I'm not denigrating the impact of a "thousand little steps"—given how far we are from where we need to be, even little steps help, a little. It's just that we need to take all those steps, plus ten thousand more. And that gets to the heart of why green consumerism of the kind espoused in MacEachern's book doesn't work—because, when all is said and done, if we keep consuming at anything like our current rate, we're going to consume the planet. recommended

barnett@thestranger.com